Last year I wrote a blog entitled “What clients want from an agency”. If you have read it you will know that it was written from a position of knowledge, having been both client side and agency side.
As well as being a blog it is also a story that I tell every new starter (can we find a word linked to Talent that we use to describe our staff) when they join the agency. What I don’t tell them, because I want them to find out for themselves, is just how exciting it is to work in a agency that is full of dedicated, focused and creative innovators. To me there are three key things that excite me every day when I walk in the building and keep my head buzzing virtually every waking hour I have.
They are the three areas that as C.O.O. I really focus on driving; Our People, our Product, and our Prospects.
People. In my previous blogs on winning teams, leading teams, listening and leadership I have preached a lot about my passion for developing, managing, and leading highly talented people. Fortunately for me, at Burrows, I am surrounded by such people. As a Leadership Team we have ‘developing our talent’ as one of our five key objectives. I am personally committed to leading the charge on this objective. Early 2019 I will talk about how we will focus on the development of our talent and how with a combination of training, engagement and staff empowerment we will take the next step towards this key objective. With these previous blogs covering the people area, I will focus this blog on our product and our prospects.
Product. As an agency we get our revenue by delivering world class solutions for our clients. When you strip it down to its most basic elements, our client has a challenge and we solve that challenge. As I say this pays the bills today. But what about tomorrow? If all we do is focus on delivering for the more tactical challenges our clients have today, how we do we solve the challenges they don’t yet have or as importantly to Burrows, how do we solve challenges for clients we don’t yet have? Innovation is the answer, we have to develop our product offering to make our current tools and processes more effective and efficient and also we have to imagine, innovate and invent our new product offering. To do this we have what we call the Commercial Team. This is a combination of Strategy and Client Management who look at our industry and our clients and map out the direction of our innovation. Any brief coming from the Commercial Team must meet my three C’s. Are we capable (with a bit of stretch), are we credible (can we leverage current work to show a natural adjacency) and is it commercial (can we sell it to clients).
Once the brief is agreed it goes to the Innovation Team. This is not a department, no we need to be flexible so that we can draw on expertise from any area of the business depending on the requirements of the brief. This does mean that often we are having to juggle innovation work with funded client work. Some people are less comfortable with the need to be nimble and review resource plans daily but for me, it is this dynamic environment that gives me the buzz!
Prospects. Equally import to growing our product offering is growing our client base. We are fortunate to have several clients that we have services for over 10 years. However, changes in markets, economies and technology means that clients evolve, change, and move on. Complacency is the biggest killer of businesses outside of cash flow (OK I made that up). Anyway, we must be constantly looking for opportunities to identify new clients who we can work with and grow long term relationships with. At Burrows we look at growth in a number of ways.
Additional business is finding new solutions for current clients or offering our current product to new departments within current client organisations.
New Business is finding that new client. This can come from recommendations, a lead generator or from your reputations.
We are finding more and more that our reputation is leading to new business opportunities. In fact, probably 80% of the opportunities we have worked on this year come from potential clients contacting is. This brings me on to the most exciting and frustrating part of leading the agencies push for growth.
Having spent over 20 years working with clients and prospective clients I really don’t think they understand neither the importance to the agency of winning a pitch nor how exciting it is for the team involved. I cannot remember a pitch in the past 5 years where the client has stuck to their RFP timings. Don’t they realise that there is a team of talents people waiting for the phone to ring or for the e mail to arrive. Sometimes they don’t make a clear “great news you’ve won it” statement but start to talk to you about the project and after a while you have to actually asked them “did we win?”.
As I type I am waiting for the result of a pitch to a potential client who would be a top five client to us. They are one week late on the decision and we are in radio silence. I’m in that “if I chase them will I annoy them” but I’m also thinking “if I don’t chase them will they think I don’t really want the business”.
For me this is the biggest buzz being agency side. Pulling together a team of highly talented people, creating a pitch proposition that ‘cant be ignored’, that is ‘the best we have done’ that ‘has to be the winner’ and then waiting! It’s the thrill of the chase that I love and that drives me on every day.
by Richard Wright
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